Candle of Expectancy – This second Sunday of Advent, we pause to light the candle of Expectancy. It is our desire to cultivate expectant hearts. Hearts that hear the promise of God in Jesus Christ and take Him at His Word. We expect Jesus to come. LIGHT CANDLE
Prayer: God, we thank you for your promise of Jesus Christ and your faithfulness to Your word. Your promises are true and trustworthy. Give us the grace to expect Him. Amen.
Sermon: What’s in the bag? (bag has a crèche and a cross) to be revealed at the end.
Just as Israel was expecting a certain kind of Messiah; a conquering king on a white horse with a sword for the Romans, we often expect Jesus to come as we expect Him to come. We want a Savior on our terms. But God, instead send His Son as a babe, born in a stable. Humble, poor, an outcast.
The task for us is to expect Jesus who will often show up in the least likely of places. We tend to seek Him in certain worship styles or only at church. We expect Jesus to show up for other people who we feel have lived the kinds of lives that God respects and are worthy of Jesus. We don’t expect Jesus to show up for us in our ordinary though. Jesus is just as interested in being with you in your daily ordinary. While you are tending to the maintenance of your house or car, while you’re doing your laundry, while you’re raising your children, at the football game, in your business meeting, while you’re driving in your tractor (and I’m not saying only when you are listening to K-Love). He wants to meet you in the mundane. He wants to comfort you at the end of the long hard day. He wants to encourage you while you’re getting dressed for work, frying your eggs, drinking your coffee. The promise is that if you seek Him, you will find Him.
But here is the hard thing for us. We don’t expect Him in these places because we have elevated His advent to the high and not the lowly. We have distanced His advent from our normal lives because we think He is only found in the high places. But this is not where He is found.
The text we read today reminded us that it is when we have served the least of these, that we have been serving Him. And while I could unpack a hundred different truths from that verse, what I want you to take away today is that Jesus is in those places and people that we don’t naturally think of.
So, we are called to expect Jesus in every part of our lives. And in order to do that, we have to open our hearts to Him in those ordinary people and places. For even in our plain paper sacks…
Open bag to reveal the expected promise of God.
